Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Why Head To Head Is Dead

In the past, the only way to get significant action in fantasy sports was to play heads-up against a (usually) very good opponent.

Many fantasy "experts" (I use that term VERY loosely) argued that without available game selection - meaning playing only weaker opponents - that it was IMPOSSIBLE to make a profit playing daily fantasy games.

Well, throw that whole argument out the window. It's now a moot point.

With the proliferation of large field contests on the majority of daily fantasy sites, game selection is no longer an issue. The fantasy sports "donkament" has arrived in full force. Pretty much every day of the week you can play a large field event for a relatively small buy-in (with a promise of a decent pay day.)

Besides the attractive prize pools, there are other reasons to play large fields and not heads-up:

-No scouting of your opposition is needed. You are playing the field.

-No more worrying about your results being scraped by the douche bags that are compiling databases on all of the daily fantasy players. Yes, these players are profiling you. They are recording the players you are most likely to pick, which positions you spend the most on, etc.

Their work is worthless in the large field contests because they have to beat all of the players, not just you.

-No more worrying about sniping in the lobby for heads-up matches. I have material proof that some players are using scripts to get matchups on some fantasy contest sites.

Not much different than sniping for ebay auctions. It essentially puts these players in the lobby 24/7 to get action. The sites need to rectify this at some point.

-Although much higher variance, large field play requires a much smaller bankroll than heads-up play. Very few sites are offering large buy-in events (over $100).

If I were just starting out in the daily fantasy game, I would stick to solely the large field events for my real money play.